


the girl who could have been on fire.

by lannisnow



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:57:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannisnow/pseuds/lannisnow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He builds the arena for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the girl who could have been on fire.

The first time he sees her, she’s wide eyed and shaking as she makes her way up to the platform. She is jittering around, eyes skating across the other girls. None of them volunteer, though it’s not unheard of in District 5. Every district before this one has had careers fighting for the chance to volunteer. Here, they send her looks of regret, relief, and shame. She is so nervous. There would be no way she would survive without cover, without trees and places to hide.

The boy is called, and he walks up with a stern face and an angry disposition.

He doesn’t catch Seneca’s attention.

***

“You are awfully smart,” Seneca says over the dull roar of the observers behind him. They have stopped paying attention, and only gave this young girl from District 5 one look as she made her way to the touch table. She matches deadly plants and safe plants with no problems, not even a glance at her fingertips on the table as she puts them together. Her head snaps to him but her fingers still dance over the lighted silhouettes. She smiles and turns her eyes back.

“The trainer says most of you will die from natural causes. How long do you intend to stay alive in this game?” He wants to get a response from this fire-haired girl. The others have responded to praise, have thanked him and tried a little harder the next time they tossed their knives, tridents, or spears. All this girl does is smile and finish the matching on the light table. Her time raises to the middle and blinks. Forty three seconds to match eighty plants.

“That’s impressive. Do you have any other skills?” Someone comments about the wine behind Seneca. He ignores them. There is more wine, a million different flavors. With that much wine, Seneca does not need to know this person’s complaints. The girl with the thin face and the fire hair nods her head and goes for the small knives.

Fire hair, Seneca notes with a bit of a smile as this girl moves across the room and throws a knife at a dummy. Not as good as the District 2 girl - what’s her name? - Clove. But that hair. Seneca thinks of the District 12 girl, the Girl on Fire, and thinks that if she had not had the cape of flames on her back, this girl, this smart, smart girl from District 5 would have won that famous name.

She flings another knife and it hits the mannequin’s knee. Seneca watches her take in her aim for the next throwing knife before she tosses it. It lands just outside of the outer ring, right in the stomach. Shoulder. Knee. Stomach. Not marked by the targets, but areas that would still cause death.

“Did you mean to hit the there?” he asks across the training area. She turns to him, wide amber eyes meeting his in a silent answer. “What is your name, again?” he asks, leaning forward and putting his elbows on his knees, fingers interlaced in front of him. She smiles and throws her red, red hair over her shoulder.

“District 5,” she says in a soft voice, putting the last knife back on the rack and turning towards the exit.

Seneca can’t remember her name, but he remembers the spirit in her when he writes the five on her score. Just enough for the other tributes to disregard her, just enough for the Capitol to see that she could deserve a sponsor or two.

***

The games will start in just a few hours. “I want to talk to the girl from District 5.”

“Sir?”

“Are you really going to question me or are you going to go get her?”

The peacekeeper leaves, abandons his post and skirts out of the room at a hasty, duty-performing pace. Seneca leans against the railing of the empty game room and stares at the walls, eyes flicking up to the ceiling. For the next week, maybe two, he’ll be in this room, then up those stairs to sleep. He will be watching tributes die one by one all through the monitors through this room and all through his choice. One wrong step and he could throw a mine under their feet or acid rain over their nightly camp. This world is his.

“Sir. We’ve brought the girl.” The girl. The Girl who should have been on Fire. The girl from District 5, the district of power.

“Leave us be,” Seneca says, turning with his hands in his pockets.

Her eyes are wide. She is nervous, but her lips are playing a smile and Seneca can’t help but answer it with a wide one of his own.

“I’m not supposed to talk to tributes before they enter the games, you know,” Seneca says when she walks to the stairs and looks up at him with her deep amber eyes. “I’ve stopped caring about the rules. Three games. All my creation. Sixty nine kids will die under my name. Every death, mine.” He smiles, rolls his head back and laughs at the ceiling. When he looks back at the girl from District 5, she looks terrified. Her eyes are large and sparkling, but her lips twitch nervously, pulling her whole face into a smile and a frown, a smile and a frown.

“You wanna know a secret?” he asks, walking down the steps one at a time, freezing at each one as she takes a step back. “You wanna know how you’re going to live?”  
She nods.

He realizes what he saw that first day, when she made him wonder for half a second longer than any of the other tributes what she would need to survive. And he gave it to her. He designed this arena for her, for the Girl who should have been on Fire.

“I’ll tell you,” he says, sauntering down the last two steps. She does not back away this time, but keeps her ground. Her eyes flicker around, looking for something, anything. Plotting an escape route. Or perhaps she is looking for cameras.

“I can tell you exactly how to survive.” He reaches forward and his fingers graze over the bottom hem of her bright blue shirt, just above her dull brown leggings. She looks flattering, really. The tributes will all have to change, though, into the clothes that he’s helped designed and approved until they all wear the same things to keep them alive. He doesn’t want any of them dying of natural causes. That doesn’t make for a good show.

She does not move away from him, but her eyes flitter away from his to look around the room again.

“If you’re looking for cameras, they’re all off. Waste of electricity. If you’re looking for a way out, you just have to say stop.”

He smiles, pulls her close and glides his fingers under her satin shirt. She looks up into his eyes and relaxes against his hands. When he touches skin, she shivers against him and jumps back.

“I made this arena for you.”

He stares at her and tries to ask what she wants with an arched eyebrow and a twist of his hands, palms turning to face the ceiling in an almost-shrug. She backs up and turns around, twists through the small maze of touch-tables and turns again, facing Seneca, when she reaches the middle table.

“You have to run. Hide. Eat the things you know you can eat, stay away from the things you know you can’t. You’ll have to steal from everyone else, but you’ll make it.”

Her mouth twitches, but after she’s situated, legs spread, leaning back on her hands with her elbows locked, it stays in a smile.

“And when you’re out of food and you’re down to the last four, kill them with the knives.”

Seneca rushes forward faster, more eager than he thought he was. The girl arches into his hands this time. Her eyes don’t dart around, but look darker and eager to hear him speak. She asks with her body what he means. He is being used for information, he knows it, and he is not ashamed.

“There will be knives. You might have to steal them, but there will be knives.”

He pushes her shirt up over her head. She bends into him and shivers out a sigh, a gasp. He runs his teeth over her skin, bites down on the flesh of her stomach as his fingers go around her body to fumble with her bra. She is not helping him, just arching into his mouth, leaning her head back to stare at the ceiling. Her neck, exposed, is too much of an offer for him to reject. He jolts up and bites and sucks at her skin. She raises a hand and claps the side of his head. No marks. He understands. It still doesn’t make him want to stop. He goes a bit lower and bites her collar-bone. She sighs, her wide eyes closing for a split second when he runs his tongue down her chest, stopping at the annoying cloth border and nipping at her breasts.

“The trees will keep you safe, if you stay in them. Stay hidden in them.”

Seneca pushes her bra away, throws it across the room. The girl falls back, elbows unlocking until she falls on her forearms and arches higher up into him as he latches onto a breast with his mouth, onto the other with his hand. He pinches, twists, bites, nips, licks. She sighs and lifts up one of her hands, tangles it in her red, red hair.

“Stay away from the Girl on Fire.”

He moves lower and tugs at her leggings. She kicks off her boots and lifts up her hips, her arm falling down to balance her again. Seneca moves back and pulls her pants off, throws them in some other direction, not caring, just grabbing and touching. He noses against her stomach and pulls off her underwear as well. Not needed. She makes a loud grunt and lifts her hand up, fisting it in his clothes. He pulls himself back up and pauses when he comes close to her face, staring down at her, waiting, careful.

“Stay away from everyone.”

She leans forward first. Seneca will swear it until his dying day she leans forward first. Her lips press against his, closed and timid and he’s hungry for it, hungry like he is for the start of the games, hungry like he is to take her life right out from under her.

“Sleep in the trees.”

His words are whispered on her lips and she huffs against his. When they kiss this time, she falls onto her back and wraps her arms up around is back, hands splaying on his clothed shoulders. He rips off his shirt. One of his hands goes for his pants, the other between her legs. Her back leaves the table, his fingers skim over her heated, slick skin, and dips in one, two fingers. She shudders around him, leans back and bites her lip, her hips shifting, feet lifting to the edge of the table as she tries to rock herself onto his fingers.

“Stay alive.”

Seneca leans over her, slipping between her thighs. She bucks into him and he finds himself, presses against her and inside her and they both groan. He finds her neck with his teeth and she claps him upside the head again but he bites hard on her collar bone in retaliation as his hips snap and pull back, snap and pull back. She bucks under him more and more and sighs in his ear with a cry and a moan.

“Until I kill you.”

She shudders around him. He grunts against the skin of her neck. When his thighs start to get tense, and his body starts to go rigid he moans into her ear, his hand going up to tangle in her hair, cradling her head until she whimpers out and he snaps his hips forward and groans in her ear.

“Or they get to you first.”

She will die in the arena.

“Just stay alive.”

Is that disgust that winds its way into his stomach?

***

The games start. He watches carefully. A bow is laid in the middle of the Cornucopia for the Girl on Fire, she doesn’t go for it. Seneca has to hold back a laugh when she’s almost impaled by the Career’s knife.

The cameras move frantically, trying to catch each death, each brutal snap of a neck and stab of a sword, each hit of an arrow and uppercut of a knife. There are six cameras on the main screen and Seneca flicks between all of them. In the bottom right, he sees the flicker of red hair disappearing into the forest.

He realizes he is smiling much too late, and turns it into a laugh of excitement, instead. No one questions him, and some even join him in little squeals and gasps.

***

“Poisonous,” she mouths. There is only one camera on her. Only playing in District 5. Everyone else wants to watch the star-crossed lovers. Seneca stands straight and shakes his head. He wonders if anyone else has caught that word, if even her own district cares that much about the girl that the couple from District 12 call Foxface.

“Ready a canon,” he says to his team. Someone brings up her face on the center board. Seneca’s gaze linger on her wide eyes and twitching smile.

She sits on the wet grass Seneca has made thick with dew and takes one of the berries, rolls it in her fingers. She looks up, straight at the camera hidden in a hollow of a tree, and she smiles. With a deep breath, she throws the berry in her mouth, follows it with two more, and Seneca watches as her eyes widen, her body seizes and fails her.

_That girl could have won_ , Seneca thinks. The canon booms, and some people in the room tear up as the Girl on Fire screams for her lover. _That girl could have won and she gave it up. She took that death away from me._


End file.
